Five Pakistani Men Are In Custody After India Seized 526 Kg Of Heroin And Meth At Sea
Five Pakistani nationals have been arrested after a 16-day operation ended in a boarding near Lakshadweep, in one of India's largest maritime drug hauls
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| Image Source: Indian Coast Guard |
The boat was intercepted within India's exclusive economic zone about 160 nautical miles north-west of Lakshadweep and 490 nautical miles south-west of Mumbai, Home Minister Amit Shah said. The Coast Guard put the value of the consignment at more than ₹3,000 crore, roughly $340 million at current rates.
The Coast Guard described an intelligence-led operation run jointly with Gujarat's Anti-Terrorism Squad and central intelligence agencies, involving detection, sustained tracking and what it called a hot pursuit before its units boarded the vessel. Shah said the operation ran over 16 days. The dhow and its crew have been escorted to Mumbai, where multiple agencies will investigate before prosecution.
Shah said further investigation was under way to identify the wider network and the consignment's intended recipients.
The seizure comes a week after Shah told a national conference of state anti-narcotics chiefs that India would uproot the drug trade by 31 December 2029, and set out a doctrine of tracing seizures backwards to their point of entry and forwards to their intended buyers. He has argued that agencies should move beyond counting seizures to dismantling networks, and this case, with five people in custody and an investigation into receivers, is the outcome that approach is meant to produce.
In an intelligence-led joint operation with ATS Gujarat, and Central Intelligence Agency, @IndiaCoastGuard units interdicted a suspicious Iranian dhow in the Arabian Sea, west of #Lakshadweep. Positive detection, sustained tracking and a hot pursuit culminated in tactical… pic.twitter.com/p2BthJvndS
— Indian Coast Guard (@IndiaCoastGuard) September 30, 2026
India's coastline sits on one of the busiest narcotics corridors in the world. The country lies between the Golden Crescent, the opium belt spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to its north-west, and the Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand to its east. Heroin refined along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier has for decades moved by sea down the Makran coast and across the Arabian Sea and Indian and international forces have made repeated large seizures from dhows on that route.
Half a tonne of heroin and methamphetamine is not something that would stay at sea. Broken down and cut for street sale, a consignment of this size runs to millions of individual doses, enough to supply a substantial user population for months. What happens next is well documented and follows a pattern, that is dependence that begins in the late teens or early twenties, work abandoned, savings drained, families borrowing against land and gold to pay for treatment that often does not hold.
The Indian state of Punjab, for example, has spent the better part of two decades learning what a sustained heroin supply does to a generation of young men and the cost was counted in overdose deaths, in HIV and hepatitis C spread through shared needles and in households that quietly went under. Methamphetamine adds a further burden, since heavy use is associated with psychosis and long-term cognitive damage and treatment options are fewer. For the state, the arithmetic is worse still. The money moves out through informal channels and comes back as financing for the networks that sent the consignment in the first place.
Modi govt. is determined to shield its youth from the scourge of drugs.
— Amit Shah (@AmitShah) September 30, 2026
In a joint operation by Gujarat ATS, Indian Coast Guard and Central intelligence agencies, 526 kg of Methamphetamine and Heroin has been seized from an Iranian boat in India’s EEZ, 160 NM northwest of…
Methamphetamine is the newer element and demands greater crackdown. Production of synthetic stimulants has expanded sharply across the region and the International Narcotics Control Board's 2025 report identified South Asia as the world's largest consumer market for opioids and noted India's growing importance as a destination for methamphetamine.
India has set new goals for eradication of drugs. Now our agencies are moving from MEETING to MISSION, REPORTING to RESULT, SEIZURE to NETWORK ELIMINATION, and CASE to CONVICTION. pic.twitter.com/Pgll6iNgAJ
— Amit Shah (@AmitShah) September 22, 2026
A single vessel carrying both heroin and methamphetamine reflects that shift. Synthetic drugs do not need fields and can be made in a room, which makes them harder to detect at source and leaves interdiction at sea as one of the few points at which a consignment becomes visible.
The Indian Coast Guard has said that it remained committed to securing India's maritime borders and dismantling drug syndicates.
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